Today, we are witness to an emergent conjuncture in speculative urbanism in which dozens of spaces are being carved out of cities, states, and countries worldwide by Silicon Valley investors with visions of creating exclusive enclaves for their peers. Not only do these new cities maintain technofeudal and increasingly technofascistic fantasies, but many mobilize racial capitalist narratives rendered about “doomed” San Francisco, where many investors bear roots. This talk questions what it means that these projects are based upon visions of seceding from the state and its doomed cities, but at the same time, many of their funders have attempted to co-opt the state apparatus itself, indexing imperial anxieties endemic to late-stage capitalism and its increasingly fascistic tendencies. McElroy also traces how many of these technofeudal fever dreams end up failing in imperial sandboxes of experimentation, suggesting that failure is an important node and analytic in provincializing the sensationalist narratives cast by today’s technocapitalists

Speaker

Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses on gentrification, technology, empire, fascism, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. Erin is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (2024) and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (2021). McElroy is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and runs Landlord Tech Watch, both centered around public scholarship and popular education for spatial, racial, and technological justice.

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